Return to torture

The recent conviction, in a Tunisian court, of former Guantánamo detainee Abdullah bin Omar undermines claims by the US administration that it has found adequate ways of repatriating wrongly arrested detainees to their home countries.
A former railway engineer, bin Omar (51) left Tunisia because of religious persecution in 1989. Taking his wife and children with [...]

The story of Guantánamo detainee Lofti Lagha, which I first broke here, and subsequently reported on here and here, reached a predictably sad conclusion last week when he was sentenced to three years in prison. The 39-year old, who had traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 after several years as an illegal immigrant in Italy, was [...]

In a genuinely startling development in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Gladys Kessler has ruled that Mohammed Abdul Rahman, a Tunisian detainee at Guantánamo who was cleared for release after the first round of administrative reviews in 2006, “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that [...]

On 6 August, just before the British government announced that it was asking for the return of five British residents in Guantánamo (Shaker Aamer, Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohammed and Abdulnour Sameur), I wrote a letter to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband asking the government to act on behalf of another British resident, Ahmed [...]

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch provides gruelling updates on the stories of Abdullah bin Omar and Lofti Lagha, the Tunisian Guantánamo detainees who were returned to the country of their birth in June. Having recently travelled to Tunisia, Daskal reports that, although she was unable to gain access to bin [...]